Bravetools Remotes

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. Adding a New Remote
   1. Setting up a Bravetools Remote
   2. Adding Remote to Bravetools
   3. Configuring Bravetools Remotes
3. Configuring Bravetools to use Remotes for image builds
4. Deploying Units to Remotes
5. Manipulating Units on Remotes

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Introduction

Bravetools supports building images and deploying units across LXD Remotes. Remotes are an LXD concept that refers to various LXD servers or clusters running at a particular URL.

Ability to manipulate containers across multiple enables features such as:

• cross-platform image builds
• remote unit deployment
• remote management of system containers

The default remote is called local and it is automatically added on first use of Bravetools. All remotes are stored in ~/.bravetools/remotes/ directory. Here’s a basic configuration of a local remote, which follows a JSON structure:

{
    "name": "local",
    "url": "https://192.168.64.60:8443",
    "protocol": "lxd",
    "public": false,
    "profile": "user",
    "network": "userbr0",
    "storage": "user-20220915121119"
}

Adding a New Remote

Setting up a Bravetools Remote

Any server that has been initialised using lxd init can be configured as a Bravetools remote. To confirm that your LXD server has been initialised, you should see the following outputs:

lxc profile list
+---------+---------+
|  NAME   | USED BY |
+---------+---------+
| default | 0       |
+---------+---------+

lxc network list
+--------+----------+---------+-------------+---------+
|  NAME  |   TYPE   | MANAGED | DESCRIPTION | USED BY |
+--------+----------+---------+-------------+---------+
| eth0   | physical | NO      |             | 0       |
+--------+----------+---------+-------------+---------+
| lxdbr0 | bridge   | YES     |             | 1       |
+--------+----------+---------+-------------+---------+

Now expose your LXD server to the network and set a trust password:

lxc config set core.https_address $SERVER_IP_ADDRESS
lxc config set core.trust_password root

In the above example, the trust password root is used.

Adding Remote to Bravetools

Finally, on your host machine, add this LXD server as a Bravetools remote:

brave remote add myremote https://$SERVER_IP_ADDRESS:8443 --password root

This step will use built-in LXD authentication to establish a connection between your host and an LXD Remote via LXD socket.

Confirm that the remote has been added:

brave remote list

myremote
local

Configuring Bravetools Remotes

When a new remote is added, its configuration is stored in ~/.bravetools/remotes/$REMOTE_NAME.json:

{
    "name": "macpine",
    "url": "https://127.0.0.1:8443",
    "protocol": "lxd",
    "public": false,
    "profile": "default",
    "network": "lxdbr0",
    "storage": ""
}

profile and network parameters refer to LXD profile and bridge on your remote respectively. You may need to alter these values, depending on your remote set up and manually edit profile and network fields to reflect your remote LXD configuration.

Configuring Bravetools to use Remotes for image builds

By default, Bravetools uses a local remote for an image build. On Mac/Windows, this is a Multipass VM, whilst on Linux host this is your local LXD server. Sometimes, it may be desirable to use a remote LXD server to cary out Image builds. For example, if your remote has a different CPU architecture (arm64 vs x86) or has more allocated resources.

Bravetools remote backend can be set in the global configuration file ~/.bravetools/config.yml by setting the remote field to the name of one of your added remotes.

name: user
trust: user
profile: user
storage:
  type: zfs
  name: user-20220915121119
  size: 98GB
network:
  name: userbr0
  ip: 10.57.220.1
backendsettings:
  type: multipass
  resources:
    name: user
    os: bionic
    cpu: "2"
    ram: 4GB
    hd: 100GB
    ip: 192.168.64.60
status: active
remote: local

Next time you run brave build, Bravetools will execute Bravefile instructions on the remote LXD server.

Deploying Units to Remotes

To deploy an image to a specific remote, you can simply append the remote name to your target Unit name either on the command line or in the service section of your Bravefile.

brave deploy brave-base-alpine-edge-1.0 --name myremote:test --port 1234:1234

Manipulating Units on Remotes

Basic Bravetools commands such as brave start, brave stop, and brave remove can access both local and remote units. If remote name is not appended to the unit name, Bravetools will assume that the unit is running on a local remote. To interact with a unit on a remote LXD server, simply append : to the unit name:

brave start myremote:test